Andrew Lord of Despair(21)

Once, at the end of a day years past, when Andrew and Astrid had faced real peril, they’d both found themselves under Gareth’s roof. She’d slipped into his room, and he’d obliged her curiosity and need for human connection, petting and stroking her to her first experience of sexual pleasure, though even then, he’d been planning his travel, and she’d known it. They’d never talked about that night, but the memory of it beat in her brain in time with the rising rhythm of her heart.

What if she’d never had that experience with Andrew? What if Herbert’s fumbling humiliation was all she’d ever been allowed to know of passion?

“Tell me what you like,” Andrew whispered in her ear.

“Everything,” she panted as she slipped her hands under his shirt. “Anything, just don’t stop touching me, please, and clothes off, now.”

Andrew lifted up enough to pull his shirt over his head, shucked his breeches in a few jerky maneuvers, then untied the bows of Astrid’s bodice and jumps—her breasts were too sensitive for stays—and peeled her garments from her shoulders. She shimmied up and out of her skirt, pulled her chemise over her head, and in a startlingly short time, became, like Andrew, completely unclothed.

“This is decadent,” Astrid said, her gaze sweeping the muscled expanse of Andrew’s nudity. He was decadent, decadently beautiful, right down to the arousal that arrowed up along his flat belly.

Andrew put a fist under her chin and raised her gaze to meet his.

“We can stop, Astrid,” he assured her gravely. “We can stop right now, because we both know this is not wise. I am not what you deserve.”

She closed her eyes and tried for patience, but the image of Andrew in all his pagan glory would not leave her mind. “You are what I need, right now. Please.”

Before she was reduced to begging—more explicit begging—Andrew again lowered his body over hers, but he changed the tenor of their coupling, his touches becoming tender, lyrical, and cherishing. His fingers brushed along her sex, and he used his mouth to bring marvelous pleasure to her nipples. When his erection probed at her delicately, she wrapped her legs around him and lifted her hips in welcome.

“Andrew,” she pleaded, “I need you inside me, for the love of God, would you come inside me now.” For years she had needed him, and that need threatened to consume her very reason.

He answered her by threading himself into her body and slowly gliding his hips forward, then retreating.

After four years without passion, without pleasure, without emotional intimacy in any identifiable form, Astrid wanted to savor the relief of this coupling. Later, she would grapple with guilt, shame, or consternation, but for now she wanted to savor the intimacy of it, the passion, the joy. Her body did not oblige these intentions, for she was coming in great, clutching contractions before Andrew had withdrawn for the third thrust.

He apparently understood, because he drove into her with measured force, prolonging and intensifying her pleasure, drawing out each contraction, and anchoring her as all sense of bodily orientation—up, down, prone, on earth—escaped her. When she lay quietly beneath him, he began moving once more, thrusting more deeply, setting up a rhythm that soon had her arching and groaning in his arms again.

“Let go, love,” he urged. “Take all you want, and I’ll still have more for you.”

She could plunder his patience for years, and yet she came apart again all too soon, and this time Andrew echoed the rhythms of her contractions with answering pressure on her nipple. Pleasure cascaded through her with brilliant, nigh-unbearable intensity, but true to his word, Andrew offered her still more.

She recovered enough to meet his gaze, the tenderness in his eyes registering deep in her body. Where had he been? Where had he needed to go so badly four years ago that they’d denied themselves even one more taste of such pleasure?

She could not ask him. He’d leave her naked and alone on the blanket if she tried.

“I have missed you,” Astrid said, a small truth that ought to be safe, for all that missing him filled her heart even as he still filled her body. She brushed her fingers through the silky dark hair falling over his forehead.

He did not echo her sentiment, not in words. He smiled down at her crookedly, and set to kissing her, using his tongue in synchrony with his hips.

“Hold me,” he whispered as he again built a rhythm with his thrusting.

She obliged willingly, joyously. Oh, how right it felt to make love with Andrew, how beautiful, and right, and loving. Tension that had built for years unfurled, as Astrid realized that not only would he shower her with pleasure, Andrew would delight in receiving it from her as well.